Guide
Rotating and mirroring video so every player shows it the right way up
Few things are more irritating than a video that plays on its side. It happens when a phone is held in an unusual way, when a recording is moved to software that ignores the orientation flag, or when a camera is mounted upside down. Fixing it should be quick. This page turns the picture by 90, 180 or 270 degrees, optionally mirrors it, and saves a new file where the rotation is part of the image, so no player has to guess.
Flag or pixels
Most phones record the sensor’s picture in a fixed orientation and add a small metadata flag saying “rotate by 90 degrees when playing”. Players that read the flag, such as the phone’s own gallery, show the video upright. Editors, web pages and older software may ignore it, and the same file looks sideways. The cure is to apply the rotation to the pixels and remove the dependency. The browser draws each frame with the rotation, so what you see in the preview is what is written.
How the picture is turned
Each frame is drawn onto a canvas that has the output dimensions. The page centres the frame, applies the mirror scale, rotates it by the chosen angle, and draws it scaled so that it fills the canvas. Mirroring is done after the rotation. A horizontal flip therefore always reverses left and right in the final picture, no matter which turn you chose. A 90 or 270 degree turn swaps the width and the height, so a landscape video becomes portrait.
A worked example
Press Sample for a three-second 320 × 180 test clip. The default is 90°. Press Rotate the video. The result is an MP4 of 180 × 320 pixels and about 2.9 seconds, with its sound kept, as measured from the result player in the browser test. The preview above the controls turns by 90 degrees as soon as you click the option, so you can check the direction before processing. Add Flip horizontally and the frames are also mirrored after the turn.
Choosing the options
For a video that lies on its left side, choose 90°. For one on its right side choose 270°, and for an upside-down video 180°. Mirroring is useful for selfie footage where text reads backwards, and for flipping a shot to match a scene’s direction. The size, quality and format options under the rotation are shared with the other video tools; keep Original size and High quality to stay close to the source.
Edge cases
Even dimensions are required by H.264, so odd sizes are rounded to the nearest even number. Videos that already have a rotation flag are drawn as the browser shows them, which is usually upright, so check the preview before turning. Vertical videos for social media are 9:16; rotating a landscape clip does not fill that frame, and crops are not offered here. Frame rate follows the source up to 60 frames per second.
Limits
Only multiples of 90 degrees are offered. The video is re-encoded, so the result is not bit-identical, and long videos take time to process. There is no crop, resize to a specific aspect ratio or letterboxing. Nothing is uploaded.
Related tools
- Video Cutter & Trimmer trims the clip before or after turning it.
- Compress Video reduces the size of the rotated file.
- Mute Video removes the sound.
- Rotate Image does the same for photographs.
Checked against the current version of the Rotate & Flip Video on .